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The Oracle of Girl World

THEIR LEADER Tavi Gevinson in a rare moment of quiet. She is on a 16-city tour promoting her online magazine, Rookie.Credit
Emily Berl for The New York Times

AN hour into her summer of freedom, Tavi Gevinson was stuck somewhere between La Guardia and Degraw Street, inching her way through the rain-soaked traffic in Brooklyn. It was a Monday afternoon in early July, and about 200 teenagers had gathered at Littlefield, the Gowanus performance space, to see the 16-year-old fashion blogger turned online impresario.

“Tavi is on her way — her flight was delayed,” a girl in a floral headband told the expectant crowd, many of them raised on Ms. Gevinson’s offbeat pronouncements over the years (“I strongly feel that daisies are literally the best thing ever”).

In the meantime, the audience of mini fashionistas snacked on cupcakes and listened to readings from Rookie, the online magazine that Ms. Gevinson started last fall. The magazine grew out of Ms. Gevinson’s blog, The Style Rookie, which she started at the ripe age of 11. Writing in a spunky, discerning voice, Ms. Gevinson shared ruminations on everything from Proenza Schouler to gym class, and posted unsmiling self-portraits taken at her home, in Oak Park, Ill.

Then, in a whirlwind so sudden it now seems inexorable, Ms. Gevinson became the darling of those she’d revered, like John Galliano, Miuccia Prada and the Mulleavy sisters. Soon she was warping through the celebrity rinse cycle: sitting front row at fashion week, interviewing Rei Kawakubo in Tokyo and drawing praise from Lady Gaga. She even garnered some backlash from old-timers, including a Grazia editor who complained at a Dior show that her bow was blocking the runway.

By the time Teen Vogue named her “the luckiest 13-year-old on the planet,” in 2009, Ms. Gevinson had appeared on the cover of Pop magazine and starred in a video for Rodarte’s Target line. Later, she was profiled by both The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. With her thick glasses and dyed blue-gray hair (Tavi was sometimes mistaken for an outré granny), she was a petite tastemaker.

But all little girls grow up, and Ms. Gevinson wasn’t content to remain a novelty. In late 2010, she announced a new project: an online magazine inspired by Sassy, the Nirvana-era teen magazine that folded in 1996. Sassy’s founding editor, Jane Pratt, nurtured the venture, and within six days of its start Rookie broke one million page views.

Rookie has made ample use of Ms. Gevinson’s celebrity cachet, with contributions from Sarah Silverman and Lena Dunham and a cheeky video segment called “Ask a Grown Man,” which has featured Jon Hamm, Paul Rudd and Judd Apatow giving boy advice to teenagers. (To a girl in high school who said she was having trouble finding a boyfriend because she was overweight and “I intimidate boys because I am funny and independent,” Mr. Apatow advised patience. “Cool people will like you for who you are,” he assured her.)

Mr. Apatow said that he found out about Rookie from his 13-year-old daughter, Maude. “I got a ton of nice feedback from kids who seemed to get something positive from it,” he wrote in an e-mail.

John Waters, who did a Q. and A. for Rookie in February, called Ms. Gevinson a “go-getter.” “I’ve been following Tavi from the beginning, right when she dyed her hair gray,” he said. “She started the faux-old movement that I want kids to take further, drawing lines under their eyes.”

As her online empire has grown, Ms. Gevinson has branched out. This year, she gave a TED talk (“Still Figuring It Out”), appeared onstage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the nonagenarian fashion icon Iris Apfel, and sang a plaintive Neil Young cover for the animated short film “Cadaver,” in which she voices a character opposite Christopher Lloyd and Kathy Bates.

The Brooklyn event was the kickoff of the inaugural Rookie Road Trip, a 16-city tour across America. For the last month, Ms. Gevinson and her cohorts have been traveling through cities like Omaha, Salt Lake City and Boise, in search of kindred spirits and the open road.

The trek culminated this week in Los Angeles, with an art show at Space 15 Twenty, an exhibition space run by Urban Outfitters, the trip’s corporate sponsor. The show includes an ersatz teenage bedroom, complete with a shrine of sacred offerings (photo albums, diaries, mix tapes) donated by Rookie readers.

At the Littlefield event, Hazel Cills, a frizzy-haired 18-year-old from Philadelphia, read a column called “To Thine Own Self Be True,” which name-checked both Polonius and Angela Chase, the main character from “My So-Called Life.” Then the all-girl band Supercute played a Rookie theme song, with the lyrics “Open the door/It’s a nonexclusive house party.”

When Ms. Gevinson finally arrived, she looked dazed. “I’ve calculated, and I’ve been up for 30 hours,” she said, having stayed up all night working on the Rookie “yearbook,” which comes out in September.

Nevertheless, her outfit (ruffled blouse, pleated Wren skirt) was pristine. In the last two years, Ms. Gevinson has morphed from punky oddball into a winsome beauty with girlish blond bangs, a look she modeled partly on Laura Palmer, the murder victim from “Twin Peaks.”

“With every phase you go through as a teenager, you have a little bit of resentment for whoever you were before,” she said later. “I would not want to dye my hair blue now, because I got so sick of it.”

Like its founder, whose aesthetic runs toward alt ’90s nostalgia, Rookie attracts a certain kind of admirer: precocious, indie-minded, with a D.I.Y. fashion sense and a belated love of the slacker cartoon “Daria.” At Littlefield, Rookie readers were forging instant connections — a community of Angela Chases discovering one another.

“We both read it,” her friend Shayna Hertz added. “A teacher at my school showed it to me as part of, like, a feminist club.”

Someone handed Ms. Gevinson a red-velvet cupcake, which she gulped down. Then she took the stage, which was decorated in pink crepe streamers, and read a Rookie excerpt of her own: a mock primer called “How to Bitchface.” (“Step one: Look as much like you don’t care as possible.”)

When she stepped back down, girls swarmed her by the dozens. “I’ve read your blog since I was 10,” one said.

Ms. Gevinson seemed overwhelmed. “There are so many stylish people in the same room,” she said, before a cache of teenagers enveloped her in a group hug.

A FEW days later, the Rookie crew was en route from Columbus, Ohio, to Ann Arbor, Mich., in a 12-seat van strewed with clothes and crafts supplies.

“By the end of the trip, the floor and the seats are going to be covered in crumbs and glitter,” said Ms. Gevinson, who wore a red gingham dress, color-coordinated with her companions. She had already acquired a reputation for crying to Taylor Swift songs while staring longingly out the window.

Video

Tavi Gevinson: Still in the Limelight

Tavi Gevinson turned heads in the world of fashion when she was just 13 years old. Three years later, she not only is as popular as ever, but runs her own magazine.

Not along on the trip were Tavi’s parents: Steve Gevinson, a retired English teacher who now acts as her unofficial manager, and Berit Engen, who weaves Judaica-inspired tapestries. Both are encouraging, but neither seems overly invested in their daughter’s career.

“We just want her to grow in as healthy a way as possible and make sure she’s got a realm of normalcy in her world, which can be a little nutty,” Mr. Gevinson said in a recent phone interview.

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Besides being Rookie’s story editor, Ms. Alani is married to the radio personality Ira Glass. Early in Rookie’s development, Mr. Glass advised Tavi and Steve Gevinson as they were working out an ownership deal with Say Media, the company that backs Ms. Pratt’s site, xoJane.

Mr. Glass recalled overhearing conversations between his wife and the Gevinsons and deciding to intervene. “None of them had been involved with setting up a business or an intellectual property deal like this,” he said, adding that he found the terms offered by Say “disheartening.” (In a statement, the company maintained that it was a “standard media ownership structure.”)

Mr. Glass helped convince the Gevinsons that they could operate independently, and ultimately they parted ways with Say and Ms. Pratt, who appears on Rookie’s masthead as “fairy godmother.” (Jeremy Zilar, a Web designer for The New York Times, has worked as a consultant to the site.)

The road trip was conceived as both a fun spree and a marketing venture that could put Ms. Gevinson face to face with her public.

So far, the girls had enjoyed meeting their devotees. “You just want to hang out with everyone,” Ms. Gevinson said. In Philadelphia, a home-schooled girl from a religious family had sneaked out of her father’s house to meet them at a record store. “She had to use her brother’s shoes to walk that far!”

The trip has enjoyed a Rashomon-style level of self-documentation, with impromptu photo shoots along the way. Passing through the small town of Carey, Ohio, the girls spotted a sign for the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation and decided to investigate. “Whatever, it’ll be cool,” Ms. Gevinson said.

They pulled up to a crisp white church on a quiet suburban street and posed in front of a four-spouted drinking fountain. Ms. Collins began snapping pictures, and Ms. Gevinson, feeling inspired, sat on the grass with a portable turntable, playing the soundtrack from “Carrie.”

A middle-aged man wandered by, looking perplexed. “Is there a special Mass going on?” he asked.

After the shoot, the girls filed into the church gift shop, which was stocked with religious kitsch. Ms. Gevinson purchased a Virgen de Guadalupe fan, a holy-water kit and a dozen laminated prayer cards — fodder for the Los Angeles installation. “I wish there was some way to be interested in iconography without people thinking you’re being ironic,” she said.

About an hour later, the van pulled into Ann Arbor, where a meet-up was scheduled at an arcade called Pinball Pete’s. The tour stops, all solicited from readers, had a wistful, Instagrammed quality: ice-cream parlors, doughnut shops. This tied in neatly with Rookie’s July theme, Freedom. Each month, Ms. Gevinson chooses a motif (Transformation, Paradise) and creates a digital “mood board” that she sends out to her contributors.

The site updates three times every weekday, and though Ms. Alani and another editor oversee the content, Ms. Gevinson has the final say. “A lot of people would not be comfortable taking direction from a 16-year-old,” she said. “I can definitely see it being a compromise of one’s pride.”

Much of the site is governed by Ms. Gevinson’s shifting pop-culture interests. She recently discovered “The Twilight Zone,” and has been on a Fleetwood Mac kick for months. (Winona Ryder once gave her a painting of Stevie Nicks.) Discussing some of her favorite ’90s movies (“The Virgin Suicides,” “Dazed and Confused”), Ms. Gevinson riffed eloquently on their common themes. “I actually made a zine about all this called Strange Magic,” she said, “but so far I’ve only given it to one person.” The person was Sofia Coppola.

Despite her V.I.P. connections, Ms. Gevinson maintains an impressively normal lifestyle. At the start of each school year, her father warns her teachers about her extracurricular pursuits. “Some of them seem kind of resentful that I miss a lot of school,” she said. But others are covert Rookie fans, and besides, she gets her homework done. “She struggled a little bit early on,” said Jay Lind, her freshman English teacher. “She couldn’t keep coming in saying, ‘I’m a fashion blogger, do you mind if I turn this in two weeks late?’ But I think she figured it out.”

Ms. Gevinson still gets romantic about the usual 10th grade stuff, like how her 16th birthday was “the best day of my life.” In a way, her rites of passage are essential to Rookie’s authenticity: it’s a place where teenagers can channel their own adolescence through hers, whether she’s extolling the cult sitcom “Freaks and Geeks” or decrying Hollywood’s standards of beauty.

In reaching out to young girls like herself, Ms. Gevinson seems to be positioning Rookie as a kind of antidote to what they are reading elsewhere. In a recent interview with Racked, she criticized one of her competitors, Seventeen magazine: “I feel like if I followed their articles about boys and truly believed it was as important to do certain things or avoid certain things as they say, I would probably go crazy. Sometimes their ‘embarrassing’ stories are literally about boys finding out that you have your period.”

Indeed, it’s possible to see Rookie as a rejoinder to a teenage culture overrun by synthetic pop confections like Justin Bieber and “Twilight.” In her (decreasingly) eccentric attire and deadpan prose, Ms. Gevinson has carved out a distinct countercultural voice, the kind that existed in full force during the bygone decades she celebrates.

Whether or not Ms. Gevinson’s fame outlasts her youth, the road trip’s popularity was evidence enough that her message was resonating, at least for a self-selecting group. At Pinball Pete’s, the road trippers sat in a pink rec room, under the glow of a neon elephant. Gradually, in twos and threes, shy-looking teenagers in chunky jewelry and ripped-up miniskirts slinked in, until the room held some 30 girls (and a handful of boys).

As the attendees chatted among themselves, a brash 18-year-old in thick braids and a floral dress introduced herself as Meghan Montgomery Jones — Marvelous Montgomery — a “dork of all trades” from Canton, Mich., a middle-class suburb that, unlike her, is mostly white.

“It’s because of your site that I got into ‘My So-Called Life,’ ” she told Ms. Gevinson.

“She’s O.K., but I wouldn’t be friends with her,” Ms. Jones replied thoughtfully.

“Yeah,” Ms. Gevinson said. “She, like, comes into your life and changes things a bit, and then goes.” With that, the group decamped to Blimpy Burger, and the next day the Rookie revolution was off to Chicago.

Correction: August 5, 2012

An article last Sunday about Tavi Gevinson, a blogger popular with adolescent girls, referred incorrectly to a Love magazine cover she appeared on. It was a hoax version of the cover that circulated on the Web; although the magazine published an article about Ms. Gevinson, she was not on its real cover.

A version of this article appears in print on July 29, 2012, on Page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Oracle of Girl World. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe